After 25 or so years doing this, I think there are two kinds of developers: craftsmen and practical “does it get the job done” types. I’m the former. The latter seem to be what makes the world go round.

If you've been doing it for that long (about as long as I have), then surely you remember all the times you had to clean up after the "git 'er done" types.

I'm not saying they don't have their place, but without us they would still be making the world go round. Only backwards.

I think there's more dimensions that also matter a bunch:

  * a bad craftsman will get pedantic about the wrong things (e.g. SOLID/DRY as dogma) and will create architectures that will make development velocity plummet ("clever" code, deep inheritance chains, "magic" code with lots of reflection etc.)
  * a bad practician will not care about long term maintainability either, or even correctness enough not to introduce a bunch of bad bugs or slop, even worse when they're subtle enough to ship but mess up your schema or something

I think the sweet spot is to strive for code that is easy to read and understand, easy to change, and easy to eventually replace or throw out. Obviously performant enough but yadda yadda premature optimization, depends on the domain and so on...

It takes both.